Mexico's Recovery Just Bypasses the Poor

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Published: August 12, 1997

MACUILA, Mexico, Aug. 8—
There is no school in this wasted hillside village, no doctor, no drug store. When the pump works, a central faucet spurts grayish water for about three hours a day, and Paula Hernandez and the other village women scamper up the steep stony paths with buckets before it shuts off again.

For the people of Macuila -- and as many as one in five families throughout Mexico -- incomes are so low that they cannot buy enough food to stay healthy. Recent Government boasts that the economy has recovered from the peso crisis in 1994 seem like cruel jokes. To them, the record-setting pace of the Mexican stock market, Mexico's shrinking interest rates and its vigorous peso -- which is actually in danger of becoming too strong -- are meaningless.

''A fruit and vegetable truck comes around only on Saturday, and what we buy depends on how much our men make,'' Mrs. Hernandez said of the only market she knows. Her husband, Marcelo, like most men of Macuila, works in the lush valley below the village, earning roughly $3 dollars a day picking beans or spraying insecticide on potato fields owned by a wealthy patron.

But by the time Friday rolls around, all that is left in the adobe shack where she cooks on firewood for her family of four are a small bag of black beans, a handful of chile peppers and six white onions.

The gap between rich and poor in Mexico is enormous, and it has widened since the peso devaluation. But just as large is the gap in the country's economic recovery, which seems to have taken hold at only the highest income levels and skipped the all-but-forgotten places like Macuila (pronounced mah-KWEE-lah).

Last week, echoing his Government's critics, President Ernesto Zedillo acknowledged that the common people have not benefited from these recent economic gains. Then, in one of his most significant efforts at social policy since taking office in 1994, he announced a $155 million program to attack the roots of poverty, which he called Mexico's ''gravest shortcoming.'' The country's two-tier economy, he declared, could not be allowed to continue.

The program, called El Progresa, will try to break the cycle of poverty by tying together health, education and nutrition benefits, with special emphasis on women and girls. That consolidated approach makes this program a departure from previous government plans that focused on a single need.

In its early stages the program will help 177,416 families in parts of 10 states, paying families $8 a month to keep young children in school, with payments increasing in higher grades, so long as the children attend at least 85 percent of classes. Girls will receive bigger scholarships than boys. By the end of the year, up to 400,000 families will receive help.

But given the size of the problem of poverty in Mexico, critics say it is a modest effort. They quickly pointed out that the Mexican Revolution was fought to a large degree over those same issues of poverty, without solving much. Generations of corruption and political interference, they said, have since kept any real inroads from being made.

Even a son of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, Mateo Zapata Perez, told reporters last week, ''We Mexicans are not as well off as they say we are.'' He said the new antipoverty program would not be enough.

El Progresa is being built on the ruins of the Solidarity antipoverty program of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, which established local committees and required people receiving assistance to put their own time, work or money into the public works projects.

But Solidarity's many achievements -- which included roads, water filtration plants, clinics and schools -- were overshadowed by widespread corruption. Large amounts of Solidarity's antipoverty funds were used for questionable projects like building basketball courts and baseball diamonds. Substantial amounts of money just disappeared, and the Solidarity committees were widely misused for political organizing.

Carlos Rojas Gutierrez, who as head of Mexico's Social Services Ministry oversaw Solidarity, said this new program would be different because it will be administered by the states, not the central Government. Local people will have far greater control over how it works, he said.

If Macuila is any example, however, the vastness of Mexico's needs will quickly dwarf the resources of Progresa, and the difficulty of distributing the scarce resources could lead to abuse. Macuila lies in the Huasteca region of Central Mexico, an area of nearly inaccessible villages hidden deep in the folds of steep, worn out valleys.

Government officials arrived in Macuila in December to conduct a house-by-house census of each family and its needs. Two weeks ago, the officials returned and told 40 of the 90 families living here that they were eligible for assistance, and began to explain how it would work.

As part of the program, mothers who are enrolled will receive $12 a month to buy milk and other necessities to supplement their children's diets. But the subsidy depends on making sure that the children are seen regularly by a doctor, a demand that is always difficult and sometimes impossible to fulfill.